He Puna Tārei, Room 5; Year Four

On Tuesday, 21st May, He Puna Kōtuitui and our friends in He Puna Auaha went to visit the Sarjeant Art Gallery and the Whanganui Museum. At the art gallery, we learnt about the artist Kate Fitzharris and we looked around her exhibition at the i-SITE.  In February 2018, Kate Fitzharris came to Whanganui from outside of Dunedin to allow herself time to concentrate on producing new pieces of art. She asked the Whanganui community to share ceramic objects with her that were important and had stories attached to them. She then used these as ideas for a year long journey into creating pieces of art. After learning about Kate Fitzharris, we went to the art room in the Sarjeant Art Gallery and created our own clay creatures inspired by her. We got our hands dirty creating our creatures but had lots of fun doing it. We also had to be careful not to trap air in our clay creature because if there is air in it then it could explode in the kiln. When we went to the museum, we were given...

We practice our reo Māori everyday in He Puna Kōtuitui... Kei te pēhea koe i tēnei rā?...

To date, one of the writing series of lessons that links to our Inquiry was learning that a simple sentence always has a noun and a verb; we'll call this the 'who' and the 'do' and learning where to put the punctuation. We created word lists (*pictured left), then the children chose a 'who' and a 'do' to make their own sentences. We are (also) learning that by adding adjectives and adverbs we can turn a boring sentence into a 'wow' sentence. Below is an example: The seal was frolicking about. The silly seal was frolicking about. Sneakily, the silly seal frolicked noisily about. By Kayla

The Māori name for the Maui dolphin is Popoto. Popoto means 'short' in reo Māori - a fitting name for the world's smallest dolphin, don't you think?!  Through their research, the children found out that there are only an estimated 55 Popoto alive today, rendering this taonga on the verge of extinction. The biggest threat to their survival comes from the practice of drag net fishing. The children are passionate about doing whatever they can do help Popoto so at present we are beginning to learn the structure of the persuasive writing genre so they can write to Minister of Fisheries, Stuart Nash, to ask him to outlaw fishing with nets in the Popoto habitat.

"It is so much fun!" said Tayla. "The water is nice and warm!" said Sage. "I love swimming!" said Devin.

'How Many Are Hiding?!' Miss Swanston wrote a number,  made the number with blocks, but she hid some of the blocks! We had to see if we could work out how many blocks were hiding (under the paper). *The big cubes are worth 100, orange sticks = 10 and the small white blocks are only worth 1 each. Do you think we got it right? Hiding was - 2 x 100 blocks 1 x ten blocks 4 x one blocks

What can you make out of newspaper...? During Active Learning Time, the children have been challenging themselves to come up with ideas for what they can construct using only newspaper, sellotape and / or staples.  "We made a house, Miss Swanston!" said Kasey. "I (also) made a person to go inside our house," said Stella. More pictures of us getting busy problem solving and creating...